Fundraising isn’t easy, even if done well, its fraught with all sorts of ambiguity and frustrations. To that very point, I recently wrote a blog post about the fundraising mindset in order to help you set a tone on approaching the process.
That said, there are things you can do to make it go better than others and things you can do to make it go worse… and in the spirit of the ‘Tonight Show’s’ top ten list, below are my top ten things that will likely cause a fundraising fail situation.
When an investors considers your company for investment at the earliest stages, who you are is so much more important than your idea. Your team is such a crucial part of your company’s success, and yet many teams omit their team slide or bludgeon it because they don’t feel they have anything interesting to add other than team photos and a job-title.
Fundraising is not easy. It is one of the most frustrating and time draining activities you as a founder will have to do as part of your company’s growth strategy. Unless you are really lucky and investors come to you, it will likely involve taking many meetings with investors of all kinds, both good and bad before you ultimately succeed in finding someone who believes in you.
Identifying milestones for your company’s development is beneficial for an early stage startup for many reasons: the first is that planning milestones allow you to focus what you will be working on, secondly the process of identifying and planning them make you question when and in what order you and your team should try and execute something, and lastly, from a fundraising perspective (something I cover in more detail in my blog post on milestones) milestones are useful to tie together what you need to accomplish with how much money it will take to get there, and fundraise accordingly.
With every New Year, we all embark on a quest to improve ourselves and make new New Year’s resolutions to that end. Of course, there are those that find the whole thing quite unnecessary, but frankly, we can all find ways to continue to push ourselves, so I’m personally a big proponent of resolutions (although you shouldn’t wait for the New Year to start if you’re motivated!).
Fundraising for an early stage technology startup is always a challenge. You have to navigate many meetings with potential investors and hopefully reach agreements that make everyone happy so you can continue to work in good faith after the negotiations are over. However, in some cases, after the dust has settled in a negotiation, it isn’t always a win-win for everyone.
This post is not about how to hire or how to fire someone, it is about highlighting the potential reasons why employees relationships can fall apart and lead to a dismissal down the road. Hopefully this is post provides with your the necessary information for you to consider on how you can prevent this from happening by setting up an appropriate hiring process and cultivating an environment where employees are not set up for failure within their defined roles.
Just as driving with your eyes closed is dangerous to your health, so is acquiring customers without knowing what it costs you to acquire them. Both can lead to disastrous outcomes. - Take a look what Carlos Eduardo Espinal, Partner at Seedcamp, has to say about the real customer acquisition cost.
Croatian consulting company DC&T, specializing in creative, efficient, and humane office space design, is setting out to conquer the world markets. First step: Dubai.
